Alive and Wounded: It’s Not Stupidity That Builds a Fascist

by Geo Barcan February 2nd, 2026

Fascism as a politics of hate is written in the language of love.

I am brought here, to you, by a conversation that took place over one sleepless, windy night on the ferry crossing the North Sea, from one isle to another. The boat’s restaurant, where me and my interlocutor were sat, had a tired, lousy décor: scratched golden handrails, seats covered in mold-green tapestry, an oval sticky bar, a geometrically patterned carpet; all worn out by the harsh years at sea and the intoxicated travelers who would rather drink themselves to sleep than face an endless night of sways through the edgeless darkness. But none of this mattered, it all faded each time we caught a glimpse of the faint line separating the two almost identical blues. While we drank our beers, we held tightly onto the glasses, so easily tipped over by the brisk swell of the night. For many hours, we discussed the 2024 presidential elections in Romania that, at the time, had just happened. To some, the events were unprecedented but not unforeseeable.

On the rocking boat, everything was tied and secured. The chairs, the tables were all held in place by a short metal cord planted into the floor. At any moment, a storm could’ve knocked all furniture through the windows and into the sea, where they would’ve furnished the dark bottom. My companion: a 40-something-year-old man from London, up to date with everything in the news. He already knew about what happened in Romania and he was asking me specific things; whether I think there will be riots happening or if people are scared. We are both giving examples from our own experiences, so he tells me about the UK. At some point, I get up for a cigarette on the freezing deck, and while I put my coat on, I tell him that what I have been thinking about for a while is the emotion that makes people vote for figures like Călin Georgescu or Nigel Farage (there are, of course, socio-economic reasons that are intertwined with emotion, but what I wanted to know was exactly what that feeling was). He starts rolling a cigarette on the sticky table, and without putting his head up, he continues talking. “One must be stupid to vote like that”, he says. “There isn’t anything else than stupidity that makes people think that such a politician will be any good”, he adds with his head up, looking me in the eyes. We then go outside and smoke quietly. What he said bothered me more than I initially thought.

On 24 November 2024, candidate Călin Georgescu won the majority of votes in the first round of presidential elections. These results created hysteria in a society so heavily divided by class, where the conservative and nationalist faction were gleaming with hope at the arrival of some sort of new messiah, while the pro-European democrats were in a state of disorder, trying to puzzle out where this hit came from. The boot kicked the anthill and agitated the unbothered, cozy colony; the boot being Georgescu and his crew, and the ants the traditional parties that steered politics for over 30 years. An old tango between the Social Democrats and the National Liberals. The hallucination continued, and on December 6^th, it was decided that the vote must be annulled by the constitutional court and the whole electoral process had to be reorganized in the aftermath of this historical maneuver. Georgescu was not allowed to run again as a result of multiple accusations of unconstitutional actions. We seem to have dodged a bullet, but the bullet will strike again. The causes that lead to this fierce anti-establishment, anti-system vote won’t be solved in a couple of years by the new neoliberal government. On the contrary, underlying issues will grow and burst, people will feel unsafe and they will respond with increasing anger and frustration. In the lack of a real socialist movement to represent people’s needs, the vote will go to the illusionists. The illusionists’ act is to fiddle with ongoing struggles in a spectacle of smoke and perverted reality whose final outcome is the suppression and dissolution of any socialist alternative.

Many heard of Călin Georgescu for the first time during the electoral campaign when, through a deliberate, aggressive, social-media strategy, his discourses gained incredible popularity (especially on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook). His political publicity maneuver was deemed unorthodox, when unlike any other political candidates, he did not rely on any traditional digital media or printed matter outlets to gain popularity. Hundreds of newly opened social media accounts supporting the new candidate and meme-ing the opposition gained an immense following overnight, while influencers preached their trust and hope in Georgescu. When asked about his overnight popularity at the voting polls, he claimed the campaign was entirely based on his social media presence, where he passionately spoke about the real needs of Romanians, a success that supposedly needed no sponsors or funds. These claims were later invalidated by the investigators when proof showed that his self-appointed, independent supporters were actually paid by Georgescu’s team with fraudulent money. Not only that many of the fan-page-like accounts dedicated to him were paid bots, but there was also a heavy amount of AI slop portraying Georgescu as different figures, including Jesus or a saint on a white horse. This, of course, was not the only time Romania has seen corruption on this scale, a well-known precedent had already been set by the other parties in power.

Fig. 1. Still image of Călin Georgescu swimming in the freezing cold water for a video campaign. Source: Georgescu’s official YouTube channel.

His dazzling virality was the result of seizing the potentialities of a multi-platform strategy that could reach a diversity of audiences further than any other medium, geographically and emotionally. Georgescu is an embodiment of the famous McLuhan thought: the medium is the message. He is a creation of the apex of platform capitalism,¹ his growth, as we have experienced it, could not have happened without the reigns of social media communication. Romanian scholar Ștefan Baghiu explains that “this wasn’t just a Romanian oddity; it was platform capitalism flexing its muscles. TikTok doesn’t just amplify voices–it manufactures movements. Platforms thrive on growth, engagement, and unpaid content, creating the illusion of “participation” while monetizing every click and share. Georgescu’s campaign played this game perfectly. No debates, no policies, just a steady stream of viral snippets portraying him as “anti- system”, despite being, quite literally, part of the system for decades. It was politics reimagined as the gig economy: you don’t need to build a coalition when you can just trend for 48 hours”.² When presenting himself as against the establishment, he aimed at the clearly exposed vulnerabilities of Romanian people, including the many abroad, knowing the source of their anger and disappointment. His political statements mixed with conspiracy theories, pseudo-science, and Christian ultra-nationalism, along with his tone of voice, video set-up, and the presence of his wife, heavily rely on affective, emotional value.

Under capitalism, all that is alive is wounded. Such is the cruelty of the capitalist system that we are being deprived not only of the saliva supposed to heal the scars but also of any form of restorative time that would allow for the wounds to be carefully and patiently licked. These life-long wounds are predetermined by the precarious conditions set into the world we arrive in when we are born. Our entrance into this world is dressed in wounds. As we traverse the exit of our mother’s womb, we leave behind a wound while simultaneously being wounded by the trauma of entering a damaged, dangerous world. The quality of life of all beings is determined by the capacity to heal and hold scars; by affecting and being affected in a world where beings undergo different forms of becoming. Our capacity to feel exposes us to the probability of being wounded and hurt but it is also the compass through which our bodies and minds navigate life.

Considering that fascism is a pathological disease that will always emerge out of the virulent crises of capitalism, like all viruses, it will attempt to ravage through and exploit anything that ensures its survival. Fascism’s mode of operation, it’s contagion through bodies, seeks to exploit our fragilities, that which makes us most human, our emotions, and inherently, our language. The persuasion of fascism isn’t based on rational or scientific thought, analysis or dialectics but on emotions and their vicious manipulation.³ For historian Robert O. Paxton, “to focus only on the educated carriers of intellect and culture in the search for fascist roots, furthermore, is to miss the most important register: subterranean passions and emotions”.⁴ At the same time, George Mosse contends that fascism begins in a visceral manner, in a place where absorption and elimination happen at once, when our brains grind to reason, we surrender to the callings of the gut.⁵

Fig. 2. Wound man, Pseudo-Galen, Anathomia; from the Welcome Collection Library.

We find ourselves on the precipice and it appears as if every time we try to move, this edge moves with us. In my lifetime, I have never experienced a period of time unmarked by catastrophe, this perpetually emergent state of collision between the political, ecological, economic, and the personal. We must acknowledge that now, just like it happened before in different parts of the Western world, the edge is becoming thinner, and the corrosion happens fast, in front of our eyes, as what we are witnessing is the rapacious self-devouring of capitalism. And, as our bodies react more immediately than our minds, we find ourselves supercharged by our impulses and emotions whose eruptions echo through bodies, especially when mediated by digital networks where propagation is imminent. Sarah Ahmed explains that emotions have a rippling effect, “they move sideways (through "sticky" associations between signs, figures, and objects) as well as backward (repression always leaves its trace in the present—hence "what sticks" is also bound up with the "absent presence" of historicity).⁶

Our minds are metamorphic and elastic, they regenerate and degenerate, altering relations with our personal identities and with the world. Neuronal events disturb our sense of reality, our beliefs, and emotions. Trauma, as Catherine Malabou theorizes, can cause our brains to morph, to explosively rupture so our synaptic mechanisms reorganize their internal functioning to the extent that we can become unrecognizable to our own selves and to others.⁷ Suffering thus changes who we are. But the brain is not trapped in a sphere; it is part of a continuum of affective economies,⁸ where everything manifests as a consequence of what happens between the gut and the amygdala. In this economy, where our emotions affect and are politically, economically, and socially affected, one amygdala can corrupt another, setting emotions to be the ultimate, most powerful, unruly contagion.

After the conversation I had on the ferry that night, I could not accept my companion’s claim that stupidity is all there is. At a first glance, such statements signal superiority, ableism and bias (something, I believe, most of us have been guilty of at some point), meaning that those with higher intellectual capacities have a better moral compass and, on further introspection, it implies that “stupid” people cannot be held accountable for their actions and decisions as a result of their cognitive possibilities. This kind of thinking positions everything in the mind, it assumes that one’s decisions are always based on rationale, separating emotions from the mind and locating them somewhere else, in the septic trenches of the gut, seen in this case as disconnected from the brain, enclosed and sterile. It assumes that one’s political views are matters of the mind and not of the body, while in reality, stress, exhaustion, hunger, despair are all political feelings. Cruelty can be a reason, fear, hatred can be reasons. Let’s remember what Sara Ahmed calls attention to: emotions are not private, they do not simply belong to one individual, they move between bodies.⁹ According to the logic of stupidity, approximately two hundred thousand people are just gullible dummies. But there was something else that punched me through his comment.

Fig. 3 Margeaux Feldman (@softcore_trauma)

How do syndromes, traumas, or wounds of the gut create such crushing vulnerabilities that make subjects susceptible to far-right extremism or to fascism? How are these emotions being manipulated in the sphere of platform contagion? What is the appeal of fascism and its propaganda?

Emotion becomes forcefully contagious on social media platforms through different modalities of mediation, primarily via images and videos. To interpret our interaction with moving images, we must look at film theory, and particularly, to at what it is telling us about the relationship between neuroscience and the screen.¹⁰ The discovery of mirror neurons at the end of the 20^th century resulted in novel ways of understanding human interaction, allegiance, alignment, and embodiment. Mirror neurons perform key functions in our interactions with each other by activating “those parts of our motor, somatic sensory, and visceral motor/ limbic systems that normally guide our behavior and map the sensory motor, tactile, nociceptive, and interoceptive sensations that we personally experience”.¹¹ Our brains have the capacity to simulate other people’s actions, sensations, and emotions into our bodies without plainly executing or mimicking those actions. This theory extends to the screen where the frequent interaction and exposure to each other’s experiences and ideas manifests as “an incorporated continuity”.¹² On social media, what bridges the realities between the users and the screens is intercorporeality: the “possibility of interacting and acting with others” enabled by the inherent qualities of our brain.¹³ Thus, propaganda profits from the virality of emotions but also from their current neuronal reproducibility facilitated by social media and the distribution of visual signifiers.

Fig. 4. Still image from Persona (1966) by Ingmar Bergman.

Georgescu communicates to his followers via video clips, usually set in what appears to be his office. This setting of his discourses is tactically curated with symbolic objects that at times change, shifting their position in space, exiting or entering the stage, re-configuring meanings with each movement. Georgescu aims to communicate to the common Romanian, knowing that any ostentatious showcase would align him with his predecessors, the opposing, corrupt Social-Democratic party, now despised by the public after years of defective governance that resulted in an ongoing crisis. Behind him, a modest brown bookshelf covers the entire wall. Among the books and the picture frames that aim to suggest that Georgescu is not only a well-educated person but also a family man, some objects take center stage. At times, it is an icon depicting Holy Martyr Filofteia, who, according to Christian Orthodox history, was murdered by her father at the age of 12 when she refused to get married and renounce her devotion to God. In an interview, his wife Cristela Georgescu describes that the icon was hand-painted by a 10-year-old girl who traveled across the country to offer it as a gift to them. While the story of Martyr Filofteia is tragic, in Christian culture, she is associated with virginity, charity, purity and became a guardian of chaste girls looking for marriage and the nuclear family. Călin Georgescu thus appears to care for the young and the poor, to understand the needs of those who are suffering, but most importantly, through the image of Filofteia, he is perversely reinforcing his belief in the traditional, heteronormative family structure. In other instances, the icon leaves, and we find him in the company of a white orchid. The strangest of objects, though, looks like a white plate with geometric engravings, known among the practitioners of new age spirituality as a flower of life crystal grid. It is used in different rituals to amplify crystals’ powers according to the user’s intentions or wishes. The board mainly shows up in videos where his wife joins him. She is overtly outspoken about her spiritual practices, an absurd fusion between new age mysticism, occultism, and Christian conservative orthodoxy. The icon of the saint and the grid board seem to clash ironically, like two symbols coming from opposing traditions, but the choreography between the objects is a symptom of fascist aesthetics and propaganda. This coupling is, in fact, demonstrative of propaganda through marketing, of the spectacle through mythmaking, illusion, and fantasy, as “fascists were urged to immerse themselves in symbols”.¹⁴ This religious Frankenstein, that according to Christian ideology is rather blasphemous, is an embodiment of both the traditional, nationalist belief, mainly represented by the elderly population, and the new age spiritual practices embraced by the younger, urban middle classes. These symbols are not there to appeal to reason, they are a cheap marketing tool that, in comparison to previous fascism, does not necessitate mass gatherings, ostentatious liturgical ceremonies, uniforms, or virtuous statues. These symbols are there to inspire passions, to appeal to emotions by precise staging via the means of social media platforms. Georgescu’s video background is not aleatory, but an arte povera mise-en-scène that changes act to act. His tactics are not an isolated case in Romania, but a multi-platform movement adopted by other far-right politicians such as Diana Șoșoacă, George Simion, or Anamaria Gavrilă, who are not just “a surge of eccentric candidates but the solidification of a new political paradigm: the constant performance of virality”.¹⁵

Fig. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 are still images of Călin Georgescu’s video campaigns. Source: Georgescu’s official YouTube channel.

Romania experiences one of the highest migration rates among Europeans, resulting in families being divided across borders. Many were raised by their grandparents or by a single parent when the other family member(s) had to leave for work abroad. While this can be a traumatic subject for those who share this experience, there is alleviation in its commonality, in the fact that it has created a new social group. In recent years, politicians have taken advantage of the vulnerabilities of the diaspora whose numbers at the voting polls have a heavy influence. Through its aura of culturally Western influences, the diaspora has also become an influencing agent after the exit polls, where some local voters believe that those abroad make more well-informed, enlightened choices as a result of their apparently cosmopolitan lifestyles. Social media has provided a great shift in the ways diaspora communicates back home, but also in the ways politicians can reach this significant faction of the population. This group is a crucial, decisive number when voting time comes and a strategic mass of wounds when it comes to pathologizing emotion in political discourse. Georgescu, through his electoral program that he spews via videos, obsesses over concepts of nation and the ideal of unity; aware of their emotional value in the current economy of affect. He goes as far as reinforcing conspiracy-pilled ancestral myths of the chosen people, a nation beyond all others. We are thus reminded of Mussolini’s famous statement: “Our myth is the nation. Our myth is the greatness of the nation”.¹⁶ On Georgescu’s official website, he states that “everything can change by accepting a system that will come back to a national school, built on historical and cultural foundations, on the national interests of the Romanians, on absolute patriotism”. On the same page, outlining his electoral ideas, he uses phrases such as “the great national rebirth” or “Romania is more than a country, it is a civilization!” In one particular declaration, he brushes over an encouragement to arming and war: “When the desire for good is aimed at the common good, then peace is equivalent to disarmament!”

By reinforcing the same ideas in multiple contexts, he manufactures the feeling of urgency, of crisis that proceeds to put national identity under threat. This construct fuels the feeling of a collective loss by channeling a collective belonging to a fictitious, constructed identity. It’s a cultivation of the us-versus-them passions. But who in reality is the source of the threat, who or what has been attempting to jeopardize “the great national rebirth”? For Georgescu, “them” is an entropic concept that has different, divergent names; western ideologues, the European Union, the LGBTQI+ agenda, socialists, mass media, and even the rich elites, including the traditional, dominant parties of the last 30 plus years. I must mention that his anti-bourgeois speech, though true in essence, lacks any form of emancipatory politics and uses the working class struggle as a ploy to “give these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves” and organize but “without affect the property structure which these masses strive to eliminate”.¹⁷ The groups he’s managed to mobilize have primarily manifested on social media, which supports a fast viralization of affects, a mass contagion. A 2025 investigation from The Guardian shows how Meta-owned platforms are a breeding ground for far-right extremist groups where slurs and disinformation are not moderated. While in Romania TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, have been the main propellers of extremists such as Călin Georgescu and George Simion, neo-Nazis on Telegram have formed groups to recruit young people for the propagation of hate crime and speech against Roma people and immigrants.

Fig. 11. AI Călin Georgescu on a horse with miracle cross sign in the sky. Source unknown.

Both my parents, now close to retirement, have worked their entire lives in the public service system owned and run by the state. After years of experiencing firsthand corruption, under-funding, and exploitation through their professions, they have rendered the system, along with all its workers, to be defeated. Exhausted, disappointed, and frustrated, they’ve clocked out long before their time was due. These institutions have failed to deal with their own dysfunctions, let alone keep up with any rising struggles. We’re small-town people and any public service establishment functions here like a mafia; only if you are in their good books, you get moving. They’re all in the same gang: the town hall, the hospital, the post office, and even the supermarket. They make the rules together—who gets elected as mayor, where are funds going to be allocated, who is going to be the new manager of X—and at times go to war against each other. Although heavy-hearted, I was not that surprised when I found out my parents voted for Georgescu. Everything that came before, the politicians, the media, the state, the corporate have all lost their credibility to the extent that even when mainstream media proved that Georgescu’s support came from mercenaries and shady money or that parts of his speeches were word by word inspired by the leader of the Iron Guard, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, they thought it was all a newsroom hoax. Distrust has so deeply imprinted itself into them that they no longer trust their kin. “Never tell your deepest thoughts to anyone, no matter how much you think you can trust them, you never know when they will turn against you”, they would always say to me. And yet, they put their trust in Georgescu and generally in any extremist, far-right ideology that doesn’t fail at identifying the source of people’s distrust and shifts the blame onto an imagined other. Not on imperialism, not on capitalism, not on neoliberalism, but on something that is not “us”. The wounded subject finds itself in need of care, of a community where it can be seen and understood. This is where people like Georgescu become dangerous and perverse:

When they flaunt their contempt for bourgeois values and for those who wanted only to earn money, money, filthy money”. They attacked “international finance capitalism” almost as loudly as they attacked socialists. They even promised to expropriate department-store owners in favor of patriotic artisans, and large landowners in favor of peasants. Whenever fascist parties acquired power, however, they did nothing to carry out these anticapitalist threats. [….] Once in power, fascist regimes banned strikes, dissolved independent labor unions, lowered wage earners’ purchasing power, and showered money on armaments industries, to the immense satisfaction of employers.¹⁸

In a public discussion, Rancière points out, in relation to Trump’s victory:

People don't act, you know, rightly because they are ignorant or they are misinformed. I think, really, how can we sustain this argument? There are today, and especially in a country like the United States, a multitude of forms of information, forms of verification of information, commentary on information, and deciphering of information. So no, it's not a matter that people are fooled by Trump. It is basically for me the fact that they like it. Smart people say: “Look at those poor people, they are ignorant, anybody can really deceive them”. No, I think the point in this case is not about ignorance, it's not a matter of misguided interest, you know, it's a matter of passions. What people like Trump do is not at all deceiving people with fake news, it really is unleashing passions. Passions of fear, of resentment of hate, etc.¹⁹

What we see happening in Romania is not a singular case, fascism is resurging everywhere and it is crutching on our shared wounds. To some of those who have been hurt, it might appear as a promise of care, an attempt of self-preservation for the few. But, in reality, what is being offered is a disguise, a performance meant to substitute the slow, emancipatory material practice of staying with one another. To take emotions seriously is not to surrender to them, but to reclaim them as a site of shared political responsibility. Care, here, is neither sentiment nor spectacle; it is a material, relational practice based on accepting our multitudes in spite of the discomfort.

Fig. 12. Screenshot from the video game Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade.

Geo Barcan is an artist and writer. Her films, installations and texts are based on the experiences of marginal subjects. Political, ecological, cosmological, and technological themes come to the surface through the experiences of beings familiar to the peripheries, at the edge of the world. Fictional or interrogative, her work manifests in experimental forms, while sculptures and objects are reconfigurations of already existing phenomena.

Since 2025, in collaboration with Edwin Mingard, she has been working on a long-term project based in Unst, the most northerly point of the UK where a community of people are living around the development site of the UK’s first vertical launch spaceport.

Her moving-image work has been screened internationally in film festivals and galleries such as IFFR, Go Short, Mostra Internazionale del Cinema di Genova, Bucharest International Film Festival, Eye Museum, W139, V2, Tent, The Grey Space in the Middle, Contemporar, and many others. In 2022 she published “Kid of the internet” with Onomatopee, Eindhoven. Her other published essays and talks were presented by Perdu, Amsterdam; IFFR, Rotterdam; Revista Arta, Bucharest and Design Academy Eindhoven.

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